“Do not try to rescue someone who does not want to be rescued.”
Tweet by Jordan Peterson January 16, 2024 [https://x.com/jordanbpeterson/status/1747332137882431572]
“We do not merely study the past: we inherit it, and the inheritance brings with it not only the rights of ownership, but the duties of trusteeship. Things fought for and died for should not be idly squandered. For they are the property of others, who are not yet born.”
Roger Scruton, emailed by a friend and widely quoted online
“When it [Queen’s University] opened its first classes in 1842, its first professor, the Reverend Peter Colin Campbell, taught classical literature. In its Memorial Room to the school’s war dead, there is an inscription around the wall, from Wordsworth, another provocative conditional: ‘We must be free or die, who speak the tongue that Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold which Milton held.’”
Joseph Brean in National Post January 26, 2024 [heckling the way Queen’s was handling its funding crisis].
“A dreadful rumour as to an engagement which had been one of its [some party’s] accursed fruits tormented me with the fresh certainty that I had not been missed, and bred in me that most desolating brand of cynicism which is produced by defeat through insignificance.”
Erskine Childers The Riddle of the Sands
“An eagle hunts no flies.”
A Saxon proverb over the desk of Col. Hans Oster, head of Department Z (HQ and central registry) of the Abwehr and an important member of the Schwarze Kapelle according to Anthony Cave Brown, Bodyguard of Lies: The Exraordinary, True Story of the Clandestine War of Deception that Hid the Secrets of D-Day from Hitler and Sealed the Allied Victory [he calls Oster “A Saxon horse gunner who was at once elegant and arrogant” and says he was openly contemptuous of Hitler and the Nazis.
“and if there be some harder, better way to salvation than to follow that which we believe to be good, then we are all damned.”
Lord Dunsany, Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley
“Isn’t it unnerving that the person investing your money is called a ‘broker’?”
Van Allen Turner of the Upstream Restaurant and Richard Cilles of the Kingston Brewing Company according to Steve Madely in Ottawa Sun March 2, 1999
“If truth is relative, to what is it relative?”
G.K. Chesterton in Daily News June 2, 1906, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)